Weezer (1994) Turns 20

Weezer (1994) came out May 10^th 1994.  Weezer’s Blue Album turns 20 today.

To say an album “changed my life” is a pretty overused phrase.  Especially an album you discovered when you were 14.  How can an album change your life when you’ve barely even lived it?  So instead of saying it “changed my life”, perhaps it is more appropriate to say that Weezer’s debut album Weezer shaped my life.

It was a few years before I really gave it a listen.  I was, after all, only seven when it first debuted.  I have a vague memory of hearing “Buddy Holly” when I was eleven or twelve: I thought it sounded dreary.

No, it wasn’t until I heard “Hash Pipe” from Weezer’s second self-titled album, known as The Green Album, that I went to the Manchester Media Play and picked up both Green and Blue.  The next days I sat listening to both albums, alternating from one to the other when they finished, over and over and over and over.    Both albums were good, but Blue was something else.

The next weeks it was all I talked about to my friends.  I had starting learning how to play guitar two years earlier in middle school.  I spent the next months teaching myself every song on that album.  I probably played “Say it Ain’t So” for friends and at parties in college two hundred times.

As a personal item it is priceless, as an album it is amazing accomplishment in music.  The Blue Album finds a blend between heartfelt, poetic lyrics and sly pop sensibilities and plays them up to a critical mass.  You can love The Blue Album because it speaks to you, you can respect it because it is a master class in production and songwriting. 

There is not a single point at which the album falters.  Every single track is new idea, a different variation on a single sound.  Anthemic force, clever pop, unbridled enthusiasm, teen angst, pained longing, every song is a feeling played out in a sharp 3 ½... or 8 minutes (some feelings take longer than others).

Years later, it has inspired countless bands and imitations.  When it was released, critics praised The Blue Album for its clever pop songs.  They could see half of what made the album great.  To see the other half, it would take time.  Not as long as twenty years, but looking back now, there is no mistaking what it has meant to music and all of the fans that Weezer (1994) shaped the lives of.

Pinkerton Deluxe Makes Me Sad

So Weezer came out with a deluxe version of their album Pinkerton this week.  It featured a bunch of live recordings of the original songs and some b-sides that were never given a wide release.

Let me just first say that Pinkerton is awesome and nearly every single extra song on this rerelease is equally so, but part of me wishes the whole thing never happened.

First of all (and semi-unrelated) most of the b-sides I have on some burned disc somewhere back from the days when I would spend 3 hours everyday downloading songs off of audiogalaxy so my need to actually purchase this from Itunes is immediately diminished but I haven't seen that disc in about 6 years and I'm not poor so I don't mind buying the occasional track off Itunes.  But $16.00 is a little expensive.

One, about 99.9% of anyone interested in buying this already owns the original album so that's 10 songs they don't need to pay for right out the gate.  Now, that still leaves 26 songs, which is a lot except that half of them are live recordings of the original songs, El Scorcho appears on the album 4 times in different incarnations.  I love El Scorcho but I don't want to pay for it 4 times.  Whatever, this is really a minor issue, I'm not gonna buy the whole album anyway.  But still.

The real thing that bums me out about this sort-of-new album is how good it is.

I've heard almost all of these b-sides before, but its been a while for a lot of them and hearing them now is like hearing them for the first time again.  The initial euphoria brought on by the pure force behind them quickly gives way to the realization that these songs are so much better than nearly every song Weezer has come out with in the last 8 years.

If any one of these songs had been a new song on one of their more recent albums it immediately would have been every fans' favorite song.  And this is coming from someone who actually likes a lot of what Weezer has done on their last 4 albums (Raditude mostly sucked though).  It's been good.  But it hasn't been nearly this good.

There was a time when Cuomo thought about things other than being cool and famous.

Maybe some of it is nostalgia, but Weezer songs just don't have the same kind of heart these songs had.  They definitely don't have the same intensity.  Songs from the days of Pinkerton were honest and insane, when Rivers gives out a guttural scream on Tired of Sex you know he isn't thinking about how many people are going to think he's cool, or if he is, I sure as hell can't tell.  Every song has a feeling to it that it could halt at any moment because Rivers just couldn't take it anymore and smashed his guitar.

I know that Weezer has evolved and that's a good thing.  You can't come out with the same album over and over and over (but ACDC did and it worked pretty well for them).  But I reaaaally liked that Weezer, and they ain't ever comin' back.